Problems similar to those in Missouri exist in Britain, too, but are just
better hidden

Yet again, America has laid on what is, to British eyes, a horror show. A white policeman goes after a black teenager for jaywalking, and ends up shooting him dead. Protests ensue, attended by his stepfather who carries a sign saying how police “just executed my unarmed son”. As protests grow, Molotov cocktails are thrown and riot police called in – this time armed with automatic guns and mini-tanks supplied by the Pentagon. The streets of Ferguson in St Louis start to look like a battle zone – and one that seems to put on display a brutal world of American inequality.

The riots in London would have looked pretty bad to the Americans: neither picture is a fair representation of a country. But there is a temptation, in Britain, to think that the American poor have it much worse – and the black protesters in Ferguson chanting “no justice, no peace” do indeed have precious little of either. The United States may be a great place to be rich, we like to think, but they treat their deprived appallingly over there. We tend to watch reports from poorer American states with a shudder, thankful that our country is run along different, more compassionate lines.

But if Britain were to somehow leave the European Union and become the 51st state of America, we would actually be one of those poor states. If you take our economic output, adjust for living costs and slot it into the US league table then the United Kingdom emerges as the second-poorest state in the union. We’re poorer than much-maligned Kansas and Alabama and well below Missouri, the scene of all the unrest in recent weeks. Only Mississippi has lower economic output per head than the UK; strip out the South East and Britain would rank bottom. We certainly have our problems; we’re just better at concealing them.

America, being richer, is more unequal than Britain – and has a long list of genuine outrages. A white baby born in America today is likely to live five years longer than a black one, for example. No such racial gap exists in Britain. This is one of a great many statistics that US campaigners have at their disposal to draw attention to inequality. Almost half of black Americans drop out of high school and then tend to earn less. There is much argument about why this is so: racial discrimination and dire education are often cited as causes. “High unemployment and high rates of out-of-wedlock birth leave too many of them without guidance,” according to a piece in the Wall St Journal.

It’s a passionate debate, which has no real counterpart in Britain. We have our share of problems, but they attract less interest. A boy born in Liverpool is expected to live five years less than one born in Westminster – an outrage, but one which we have grown used to. In fact, you only have to walk across Westminster Bridge and life expectancy drops by five years. As our politicians enjoy summer drinks on Parliament’s terrace, they can hear Big Ben echoing from buildings in a part of the city that badly needs their help. But they will have known this for years, and grown inured to it. Our poverty is hiding in plain sight.

We have specialised in building council houses in the middle of cities, and their proximity has created the illusion of social cohesion. In America, rich and poor keep more of a distance, partly because there is more space that allows the rich to move out. Cities like St Louis have been emptying for decades due to “white flight”, where the wealthier workers up sticks to the suburbs. In 1970, the population of Ferguson was 99 per cent white. Now it’s 67 per cent black – but the school boards, police force and judiciary are overwhelmingly white. The ingredients for racial tension are all there.

Eric Holder, America’s Attorney General, visited Ferguson earlier this week, offering his understanding not just as a lawyer, but as a black man. People there told him “about the mistrust they have at a young age”, he said afterwards. If he had sat down with black Brits, he might have heard the same: a poll earlier this year showed that most ethnic minorities think the police are too quick to use force. Theresa May, the Home Secretary, has been worried for some time about the number of blacks stopped and searched in the capital. As she knows, Brits are in no position to preach.

When it comes to inequality of schooling, Britain needs humility more than ever. Much has been made in recent days about the inferior education given to poor blacks in America. Britain is innocent of this charge, but is it really so much better that our poor whites (ie, those on free school meals) get lower exam grades than any other ethnic group? American campaigners are outraged that their most deprived pupils do worse at school than deprived pupils in Estonia and Vietnam. The same is true for deprived Brits, but fewer people make a fuss about it.

So the poor in both countries are being failed by an inadequate education system, but only Americans get so angry that they make films about it – like Davis Guggenheim’s Waiting for Superman. It tells a story more compelling, and horrific, than the trouble in Ferguson. The star is Geoffrey Canada, whose Harlem Success Academy managed to reverse the black-white achievement gap in maths (among many other successes). The viewer follows a mother from the Bronx in her desperate attempt to find a place there for her son – one of 792 students applying for 40 places. Admission is decided by a public lottery, to which the parents are invited as numbers are pulled out of a bingo machine. The ending is almost too painful to watch.

Such inequalities are just as bad in England’s education system, of course, but there will be no film about them. Our school lottery is done by letters sent out from councils. British poverty is one of the least glamorous subjects in the country, a cause for which no one will wear a wristband. When Michael Gove was education secretary, he had a Waiting for Superman poster framed on his wall. He wanted to dedicate his time in the job to fighting for the sort of people who tend not to vote, and are – ergo – easily ignored. As he found out, there is precious little political capital in doing so. He was demoted – apparently because he was fighting too hard, too close to an election.

Gove joins the line of reformers, Labour and Tory, who fell after trying to do something about the causes of inequality – making too much fuss over a problem that is, politically, easy to ignore. Managing poverty is easier than trying to tackle it: we would rather build motorways with exits directly into the upmarket parts of town (Glasgow) or erect a gate around new housing developments, cutting the risk of crime (and exposure to the community).

Britain’s welfare state, and the tax that goes with it, is so costly that it feels like we ought to have solved the problem by now. Instead, we have created the most expensive poverty in the world – and managed to hide it in houses that look nicer than America’s ghettoes. The Government’s welfare reforms are tackling this, but it is far from clear that the education reforms will keep going without Gove. It’s understandable to look at Ferguson and wonder how things could go so wrong for a country. But there is plenty to be shocked about at home.